Prosperity

MGM had a big star in the early sound era with the presence of Marie Dressler. As was often the case in those early sound days, studios would put their players in all sorts of movies to keep them in the public eye. In this case, that meant a series of comedies with Polly Moran. One that I haven't blogged about before is Prosperity.

One thing belying the movie's early sound provenance is the use of title cards to introduce a couple of scenes, with the opening here telling us the movie starts in 1925, "when money talked and was on speaking terms with everybody". Dressler plays Maggie Warren, who owns the family bank in one of those small cities that populated Hollywood movies of the era. She's got an adult son John (Norman Foster), who is being groomed to take over the bank when Mom retires. John, for his part, is about to get married to his girlfriend Helen Praskins (Anita Page). She just happens to be the daughter of Lizzie Praskins (Polly Moran), who is the largest depositor of the Warren bank.

Maggie and Lizzie are constantly at odds with each other for whatever reason, starting with the preparations for their children's wedding, a scene which goes on rather too long. But the two kids get married and have a coupld of kids, and would be ready to live happily ever after, if only it weren't for that damn crash of 1929 which led to the Great Depression, and money not talking to as many people. A lot of banks failed, but Maggie's prudence has kept the Warren bank open.

That is, until Lizzie gets all panicky at the idea of her money not being safe in the bank. She not only wants to withdraw it, but makes the request in a way that everybody else knows what she's doing, leading to a run on the bank which renders the bank illiquid because the money is in Mr. Jones' business and the Smith family house, and all that other stuff Jimmy Stewart reminded us of in It's a Wonderful Life. The bank is forced to close, although Mom is able to hold on to some bonds in the hope of re-opening the bank if enough people can pay back those loans.

As part of Maggie's prudence and sense of honor, she liquidates her house and a lot of her personal belongings to make her customers whole. This forces her to move in with her son and daughter-in-law. As in The Mating Season, the young couple has both mothers-in-law living with them, which causes a lot of tension as Lizzie treats Maggie like dirt. In one scene of obvious foreshadowing, Maggie keeps rat poison around and Lizzie, worried about her grandkids getting into it as well as wanting to spite Maggie, dumps the poison and puts her "Prune-o-Lax" laxative into the bottle to keep anybody else from stealing it.

John Warren isn't as prudent as his mother, and gets swindled out of the bonds by a Mr. Holland, played by ubiquitous MGM villian John Miljan. This leads to the climax where John has to get the bonds back, while Maggie has finally drunk the rat poison in an attempt to commit suicide. It also leads to a happy ending and Lizzie realizing the error of her ways.

Prosperity was a hit, in no small part because of the pairing of Dressler and Moran, who are quite good at playing off of one another. However, modern audiences may have some issues with the movie since it's very much a product of the early 1930s (and the technical issues from movies of that era). That, and the fact that Polly Moran's character is just so nasty to everybody around her. If I were introducing people to Marie Dressler, I'd pick some of her other movies first.